With the expedite development of mobile communications technologies in the high-speed broadband data access field, in multi-media multi-task smart phones/tablets, and in cloud computation-based applications, an end user can conveniently access or download applications via a mobile terminal anywhere and anytime. Since more and more service providers attract users' eyeballs by providing massive applications, operators desire to perform charging control to corresponding data.
Therefore, a sponsored data charging model between a network operator and a service provider emerges. In this model, the service provider attracts users to pay for the applications downloaded from the service provider, instead of directly paying the network operator. The service provider shares the payments from those users with the network operator to compensate the network operator for the broadband network provided for downloading these application data.
In the prior art, 3GPP introduces the Policy and Charging Control (PCC) technology to assist the network operator to control and management the network bandwidth so as to protect its particular resources in the network. However, the existing PCC architecture cannot be well adapted to the sponsored data charging model. The PCC architecture can only allow the operator to control data service connections of its own subscribers, but cannot well address the issue of how to perform policy and charging control for the subscriber's data service connections.
Therefore, it becomes an imminent problem to solve how to perform charging control to a sponsored data application so as to enhance the accurate ratio and efficiency of the charging system.